Rick Perry and the Struggle for Civil Rights and a Lower Tax Rate

It took one visit, on my first day in Chicago, to a liquor store on South Stony Island, late at night, to convince me that I was a White, liberal, do-good honkie.

I had moved from California, where I had worked to integrate a White city. I understood racism, but I didn't know what it felt like until that night on South Stony Island Avenue. It made me scared. Angry. To want to piss in my pants.

Rick Perry knows just how I felt. Rick is the Governor of Texas. He wants to be President of these United States in order to make everything a little bit more like Texas.

They don't have buses in Texas--at least not for real Texans--but Rick has heard about sitting the back of them, and about separate drinking fountains, and slavery and Jim Crow laws and all of that. And they have a lot of happy immigrants from Mexico--some of whom were there first--who are as happy as larks to work for minimum wages. Rick knows all about Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevards!

Probably because of the dedication of the new Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C., they asked Rick to say a few kind words in honor of the occasion. Rick said that he understood the struggle of Black Americans for their civil rights. It was a lot like the Republican struggle to get a lower tax rate, he said.

Rick has been there! You know, separate fountains for those who pay corporate taxes. Millionaires in the back of the bus. Separate schools for rich kids; having to buy their own iPads.

Maybe it is time to elect a president who had done there, been that!

Some day, if there is still space on the Mall, we might see a monument to Rick, maybe hunched over the big end of a telescope, discovering little tiny things.

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The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there

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